My earliest memory is learning to read 'Muffin the Mule' when I was about three.

If you're going to play it out of tune, then play it out of tune properly.

The gigs I enjoy are the ones where I'm so angry and paranoid, and I hate the audience so much, that I put everything into it to feed off the aggressive side of it. I don't actually hate the fans but when I'm feeling angry, pissed off, and full of hate, it's a good gig for me.

When I was 18 the vision was to make music that didn't exist, because everything else was so unsatisfactory.

I can write, boy, I can write. That's what I do. The trouble is that it's too bloody easy for people, that's why music is in the sorry state that it is. Any idiot, actors mainly, can go in there, sing a chord, bang on a machine... I'm not objecting to that but when people get at me for trying to say something in a rock 'n' roll mode it's as if I'm the freak.

It's just like music when you reckon it up. It's like, listening to Pavement, it's just the Fall in 1985, isn't it? They haven't got an original idea in their heads.

When I was 14 I used to have a calendar on my wall, crossing the days off until I was 15, because the school leaving age was 15. Then three months before I turned 15 they changed the leaving age to 16.